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ОглавлениеNo study of Rand’s Objectivism would be complete without a consideration of the life and thought of N. O. Lossky, her philosophy professor at Petrograd University. The relationship between these two is of paramount historical importance because it was probably Lossky who introduced Rand to dialectical methods of analysis.
It has been said that Rand read little philosophy in her mature years. But as a student at the university, she would have been required to study many philosophic texts in depth. It is very likely that at no time in her life did Rand read as much philosophy and literature as she did while being educated in Russia. Hence, one cannot discount Lossky’s impact: as Rand’s first philosophy teacher, he laid the basis for a highly integrated view of the philosophic disciplines.
In his lectures, Lossky presented broad methodological tools with which to analyze the contributions of important thinkers in intellectual history. According to Rand, Lossky introduced her to the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Since Rand paid homage to Aristotle as her philosophical forefather, this first encounter with his work was of prime significance to her intellectual development. It is quite possible too that Rand’s interpretation of Aristotle may have taken root in Lossky’s.
It is nearly impossible to establish with certainty that Rand actually studied Lossky’s writings. But Lossky’s conception of the history and method of philosophy—his intuitivist epistemology and organicist ontology—permeated his lectures and seminars. He was famous for teaching several Petrograd courses that explicitly reflected his antimaterialist and anti-Marxist orientation. And in the years before Rand entered the university, he published two of the most important works of his career, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge and The World as an Organic Whole. It is very likely that she would have been presented with significant Losskyian themes within the context of the course she attended.
AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky was born in the village of Kreslavka in Vitebsk, a province west of Moscow, on 6 December 1870. He was educated at the classical gymnasium in Vitebsk, but was expelled for his socialistic and atheistic beliefs.1 Continuing his studies in Switzerland, Lossky returned to Russia in 1889 and entered St. Petersburg University two years later. Lossky graduated from the college of History and Philology and the college of Natural Science. His mentor at the university was the distinguished Kantian philosopher, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky. It was through his interactions with Vvedensky that Lossky developed a passion for philosophy. Eventually, Lossky became privatdocent of philosophy and delved deeply into the thought of Vladimir Solovyov.2
In 1899, Lossky went abroad to study with Wundt, Muller, and Windelband. These three helped Lossky to prepare for a full-time professorship, while also influencing his emerging religious idealist perspective. Wilhelm Wundt, who occupied the Chair of Philosophy at Leipzig from 1875 to 1918, shared Lossky’s view of the world as a totality of individual agents. Wilhelm Windelband, who occupied the chairs of Philosophy at Zurich, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg, was a post-Hegelian, neo-Kantian thinker of the Baden school. It was from thinkers such as Windelband that Lossky further developed his mastery of philosophic integration. Rand’s protégé, Leonard Peikoff, reviewing Windelband’s classic History of Philosophy, praises its structure, coherence, and logic. Windelband was known for his uncanny ability to trace interrelationships between seemingly disconnected topics3 and must have marveled at his student, Nicholas Lossky, who was learning to do the same.
Lossky received his master’s in 1903 and completed his doctorate in 1907 with a dissertation titled “The Foundations of Intuitivism” (Obosnovanie intuitivizma), which was later published.4 During this period, Lossky contributed to several Russian journals, including Novaia zhizn’ in 1905, Poliarnaia zvezda in 1906, and Russkaia mysl’ in 1909 (Kline, 18 August 1993C). In that same year, 1909, many Russian intellectuals, including Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Struve, and Frank, contributed to the publication of a famous symposium, Vekhi (Signposts). As ex-Marxists, these thinkers warned prophetically of revolutionary excesses and proclaimed a manifesto for Russia’s spiritual reawakening. (Rosenthal and Bohachevsky-Chomiak 1990, 4, 22–23). Like several of his contemporaries, Lossky was moving toward a synthesis of neo-Idealism and religion.
But Lossky also owed a debt to German scholarship and philosophy, which was reflected in his sustained efforts to bring German works to a Russian audience (Kline 1985, 265–66). He translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s dissertation of 1770, and Friedrich Paulsen’s monograph on Kant. He also edited two translations of Fichte in 1905 and 1906 and was a cotranslator of works by Fischer in 1901–5 (ibid.).5
Lossky became a lecturer at St. Petersburg University and held a professorship from 1916 until 1921. During this period, he wrote several works that firmly established his reputation in Russian philosophy. Throughout his career, he published such distinguished books as The Fundamental Doctrines of Psychology from the Point of View of Voluntarism (1903); The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (1906); The World as an Organic Whole (1917); The Fundamental Problems of Epistemology (1919); Logic (1922); Freedom of Will (1927); Value and Existence (1931); Dialectical Materialism in the U.S.S.R. (1934); Sensuous, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition (1938); his acclaimed History of Russian Philosophy (1951); and Dostoyevsky and His Christian Understanding of the World (1953).
Lossky’s works eventually were published in many languages. His student, English interpreter, and lifelong friend, Natalie Duddington, was the first to read one of his articles on intuitivism before the Aristotelian Society in England in 1914. Her translations of The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge and The World as an Organic Whole were the first presentations in English of a bona fide technical work by any twentieth-century Russian philosopher (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, 315). Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Lossky continued to publish in many journals worldwide, including the Personalist, for which he served as a foreign advisory editor. Coincidentally, the Personalist would later become the first forum in which professional philosophers would debate the ethical theories of Lossky’s student, Ayn Rand.
Lossky’s life was severely disrupted in 1921–22, when despite his adherence to Fabian socialism, he was denounced by the regime as a religious counterrevolutionary. Under the guidance of Father Pavel Florensky, Lossky had reentered the Russian Orthodox Church in 1918 after having miraculously survived an elevator accident. His religious views cost him his professorship in philosophy and eventually led to his exile from Russia.
Lossky left the Soviet Union in November 1922 and settled in Prague, where at the invitation of Thomas Masaryk he began teaching at the Free Russian University. He also taught at Charles University and the University of Bratislava, where he was appointed professor in 1942. When the Soviets entered the city toward the end of World War II, Lossky escaped to the United States. His son Vladimir became a theologian and historian of religion. His son Andrew, a graduate of Yale University, went on to teach history at UCLA. His son Boris became a distinguished art historian.
In 1946, Lossky was appointed professor of philosophy at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Academy in New York City.6 Lossky taught and lived at the Union Theological Seminary building on 121st Street and Broadway, before St. Vladimir’s moved to Crestwood in 1963. By the early 1950s, Ayn Rand was also living in New York City. Some thirty years after their initial encounter, Rand and Lossky were neighbors again, a fact which neither realized.
In October 1961, Lossky entered a Russian nursing home near Paris, closer to his son Boris, and in 1965, died.
More than twenty-five years after Lossky’s death, a postcommunist Russia is beginning to rediscover the richness of its prerevolutionary intellectual heritage. Starting in 1989, such journals as Voprosy filosofii and Voprosy literatury began publishing the first of a projected thirty-five to forty volumes on Russian philosophy and literature, featuring the works of the Symbolists, Solovyov, Frank, Shestov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florensky, and Lossky, among others.7 Voprosy filosofii began publishing Lossky’s memoirs, Vospominaniia, in 1991.8
LOSSKY’S PHILOSOPHY: AN ECLECTIC SYNTHESIS
Lossky characterized his intuitivist philosophy as an integration of idealism and realism. He rejected “one-sided idealism” and “one-sided materialism,” and proposed an “ideal-realist” perspective that sought a “unity of opposites.”9 He was influenced by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Solovyov, Külpe, Bergson, and most important, Leibniz.10 The intellectual debt that Lossky owes to Leibnizian monadology and Bergsonian intuitionism is expressed in his dictum that “everything is immanent in everything else” (Shein 1967, 86). Though Lossky was more rationalistic than most of his Russian predecessors, he combined Leibnizian and Platonic realism with a deeply organic view of the world.
As part of the Russian religious renaissance, Lossky, like Solovyov, rejected the Thomistic separation of philosophy from theology (Copleston 1988, 60). Like Semyon Frank, Lossky conceptualized three hierarchical levels of existence: the physical/real, the spiritual/ideal, and the mystical/ metalogical in which both material and spiritual elements are united.11 Real being has a spatiotemporal character. Ideal being, which has a nonspatiotemporal character, includes the apprehension of relations, number, unity, and plurality. Metalogical being corresponds to the Absolute. To apprehend each of these three levels, human cognition engages three corresponding types of intuition: sensory, intellectual, and mystical. Each of these forms is organically linked to the others.
Lossky’s philosophy aims to overcome both Humean skepticism and Kantian rationalism. Acclaimed as “a great master of the word” (Zenkovsky 1953, 662), Lossky defended a pluralistic, though organic, view of the world. He saw his epistemological theory as a form of intuitivism. Rejecting Cartesian dualism and subjectivism, he insisted on the integrity of knowledge. His intuitivism is a doctrine of “epistemological coordination,” in which “the cognized object, even if it forms part of the external world, enters the knowing subject’s consciousness directly, so to speak in person, and is therefore apprehended as it exists independently of the act of knowing” (Lossky 1951, 252). Hence, we do not perceive the mere stimulation of sensory organs. We perceive and apprehend real existents. Even though our perceptions are selective and fragmentary and may differ based upon each individual’s subconscious choices, the knowing subject directs his or her attention on the actual objects of the external world (ibid.).
Relational contemplation becomes possible because the world is an organic whole of constituent elements. Like Leibniz, Lossky argued that the world consisted of monads, or “substantival agents,” of which human beings were of prime importance. But for Lossky, these agents were not “windowless.” Lossky rejected metaphysical atomism. He insisted that substantival agents were not self-contained and independent, but interacted in an organic system of “hierarchical personalism” (Zenkovsky 1953, 659, 662, 666). He argued that “the whole world consists of actual or potential persons.”12 In Lossky’s view, every agent in the universe, even an electron, is a potential person. These agents enter into relations with one another to form a single systemic whole. But as a religious idealist, Lossky asserted that the highest agent is the World Spririt. By conceptualizing an organic system united by an Absolute, Lossky attempted to avoid the radical plurality of the atomists, while making the universe intelligible (Shein 1973, 146).
Lossky opposed what he described as the “extremes” of both “universalistic” and “individualistic” systems of philosophy. In the former, the individual is granted no independent value, whereas in the latter, the individual is totally independent of the whole. Although it aims to promote human diversity, individualism constructs a social system of undifferentiated atoms and culminates in a crude solipsism.13 The truly organic system is neither wholly collectivistic nor atomistic, but interweaves unity and plurality.
However, Lossky achieved such organicism through a mystical union. Deeply influenced by his Russian philosophic predecessors, Lossky was part of a pre-Bolshevik religious renaissance. He incorporated mystical and communitarian notions into the corpus of his thought. He opposed ethical relativism, and presented an absolutist morality. He argued that existence and value are mutually related through a Supracosmic principle discoverable by mystical intuition (Shein 1967, 86–87). This Absolute is God, the perfect, almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent being. All substantival agents and all intrinsic values (e.g., Being, Love, Beauty, Truth, Freedom) emanate from God. As an adherent of Russian Orthodoxy, and in quasi-Hegelian fashion, Lossky argued that the gulf between God and Man is bridged by Christ, the God-Man of the Trinity.
Like most Russian philosophers, Lossky (1951) also embraced the notion of sobornost’, such
that the creativeness of all beings that live in God must be completely unanimous, soborny (communal). Every member of the kingdom of God must make his individual, i.e., unique, unrepeatable and unre-placeable contribution to the communal creativeness: only in that case will the members’ activity be mutually complementary, creating a single and unique beautiful whole, instead of being a repetition of the same actions. (259)
In the Kingdom of Harmony, each part exists for the whole, just as the totality exists for each part. For Lossky ([1917] 1928), in the Kingdom of Harmony, there is “a complete interpenetration of all by all, the distinction between part and whole disappears: every part is a whole. The principles of organic structure are realized in the completest way possible. It is a wholly perfect organism” (81). In the Kingdom of Harmony, there are no egoistic “acts of repulsion.” For Lossky, as for Solovyov before him, selfishness separates us from God, and is the primary evil. Because human beings have free will, they must choose the purity of moral perfection by embracing the path to God. In Lossky’s view, only “Goodness and beauty can exist in their pure form without any admixture of evil or ugliness.” But the evil must depend upon the good in order to survive, for “evil and ugliness can have no reality without having some element of beauty and goodness in them.”14
LOSSKY AND ARISTOTLE
It is easy to see why, in later years, Rand characterized Lossky as a Platonic philosophical adversary (B. Branden 1986, 42). Given Lossky’s idealistic notions, Rand’s depiction is certainly not without merit. Yet, though Lossky had much in common with Platonists, he argued that his “ideal-realism” was rooted in the “concrete ideal-realism” of Aristotle. For Lossky, Aristotle offered the first version of the concrete ideal-realist perspective. It is here that we can begin to appreciate Lossky’s method of analysis, despite the explicitly mystical content of his formal philosophy. It is here that we can begin to dissect the dialectical kernel in Lossky’s mystical shell. For in his dialectical methodology, Lossky has integrated a Russian tendency toward synthesis with complementary elements in Aristotelian, Leibnizian, and Hegelian thought. Lossky ([1917] 1928) writes:
According to Aristotle, every particular thing and being in the world is the result of the combination of matter and form.… Abstraction being made of these definite characteristics of concrete things, matter is conceived of as the possibility of any one of these forms or characteristics.… Aristotle was a naturalist who never lost sight of living reality … [forming] abstractions without separating from living reality that which is abstracted from it, but merely mentally emphasizing it for the sake of observing it more carefully against the whole background of real existence. (193–94)
By tracing his own position to the “concrete ideal-realism” of Aristotle, Lossky suggested that the classical Greek thinker was a forerunner of the intuitivist perspective. This is not to say that Lossky’s epistemology is essentially Aristotelian. In later years, Lossky claimed that he shared the Aristotelian realist view that people directly apprehend their own mental states and the objects in the external world. But for Lossky, this realist tradition fails because it accepts the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. Lossky (1957) explained that in the Aristotelian epistemology,
Man can cognize objects of the external world because human reason is the potential form of all objects which becomes actual when those objects are perceived.… When a man perceives a stone, the form of the stone is present in his mind, but he does not become a stone because only the form, and not the matter, of the stone enters his mind. Since, however, the form is the essence of an object, we may say that in a certain sense knowledge of an object implies the identity between the thought and the object of thought. This identity is but partial, because only the essence of an object, and not its existence, is present in the human mind. (38)
This is not sufficient, in Lossky’s view, because in Aristotle’s realism, the mind grasps only the metaphysical essence but not the existence of the object. In Lossky’s intuitivism, the “conditions of direct perception” allow for the immanent presence of the object “in the knowing subject’s consciousness” (42). It is this insistence on direct intuition that also leads Lossky to reject the “causal theory of perception,” which states that “the action of external objects upon the sense organs and through them on the cortex is the cause that produces in the subject’s mind the contents of sense perception.” Although the causal theory assumes that there are external objects, it inevitably regards everything in human consciousness as “mental and subjective.”15 Rejecting the causal theory as subjectivist, and Aristotle’s theory as insufficiently intuitivist, Lossky (1955) argued that genuinely “direct intuition” preserves the objectivity of the existents it perceives; the mind processes information through an “immediate contemplation of reality” (139). We perceive existents as they exist, not as distorted copies.
Rand would have applauded her teacher’s rejection of the subjectivist theory, but she would have viewed Lossky’s approach as nonobjective and “intrinsicist.”16 Rand argued that although the subjectivists view concepts as products of consciousness apart from existence, the intrinsicists view concepts as intuitively grasped products of reality apart from any “distortions” of consciousness. For Rand, the subjectivists attempt to circumvent reality, and the intrinsicists try to circumvent the identity of consciousness. Rand would have argued that Lossky had merely embraced intrinsicism as a means of fighting subjectivism, and that neither approach is genuinely objective.
But for Lossky, objectivity is preserved through direct intuition in which the metaphysical existence of the object is “given to” the mind, thus collapsing the distinction between form and matter, essence and existence. Epistemologically, people achieve a coordination between subject and object that provides for a direct insight into both the essential and existential reality of the thing. And yet, because we are not omniscient, we are never able to know completely and exhaustively the infinite complexity of an object in its organic wholeness. Each act of discrimination and comparison is an attempt to resolve the fragmentation and incompleteness of human knowledge (Lossky 1957, 43). As a neo-Leibnizian personalist, Lossky argues that every substantival agent in the universe grasps a fragment of the whole. From the smallest electron to the Absolute World Spirit, all substantival agents are “consubstantial” and “welded into a single whole” (41). Hence it is in the Whole that the Truth is to be found.
This variation on Hegel’s dictum is more a metaphysical proposition than it is an epistemological one. For Lossky assumed the existence of substantival agents on levels lower and higher than the human. These are metaphysical assertions which Rand would have rejected categorically. And yet it must be remembered that Lossky presented an intuitivist perspective that he believed owed much to the concrete ideal-realism of Aristotle. Though he rejected aspects of the Aristotelian epistemology, Lossky saw Aristotle as a philosophical intuitivist. In later years, Rand would present an interpretation of Aristotle that linked the Greek philosopher to a similar metaphysical-intuitivist tradition. Rand explained that Aristotle affirmed the existence of essences in concretes.17 Aristotle “held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly” (Introduction, 52).
She argued that Objectivism departs from Aristotle’s theory by regarding “essence” as epistemological and contextual, rather than as “metaphysical.” One can speculate that Lossky’s lectures on Aristotle provided Rand with an intuitivist interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy.18 This might explain her insistence that Aristotle’s theory was a form of intuitivism with an emphasis on metaphysical “essence.”19
It is clear, however, that Lossky saw Aristotle as a spiritual ally in his struggles against dualism and atomism. After all, Aristotle had opposed both the Eleatic monists and the Heracliteans. As Tibor Machan (1992) explains: “Eleatic monism is the affirmation of identity to the exclusion of difference and the affirmation of stasis to the exclusion of change. The Heraclitean flux is the affirmation of difference to the exclusion of identity and the affirmation of change to the exclusion of stasis” (48).
Embodying both change and identity, being and becoming, Aristotle’s notion of identity is profoundly ontological. Becoming presupposes Being, change presupposes identity. Like Rand after him, Lossky praised Aristotle’s ability to integrate these facts of identity and change, the basic axioms of existence and mind. Lossky endorsed an ontological interpretation of the laws of logic.20 For Lossky ([1917] 1928), “Logical and metaphysical principles fundamentally coincide: they are the expression of the same general structure of the world, considered in its different aspects (viz. in its significance for knowledge and for being)” (173). Like Aristotle, Lossky viewed the laws of logic as “therefore, no less a real than … a logical necessity.”21 A is A, but this logical identity is not a static tautology; it too is an expression of a metaphysical fact.
Lossky appreciated Aristotle’s attempt to transcend the one-sided traditions of his predecessors. Aristotle’s emphasis on the concrete led him to condemn both the Platonic idealists and the Democritean atomists. For Aristotle, Plato had committed the fallacy of reification; he had inferred the existence of (specific) things from a (general) Ideal abstraction. Aristotle aimed to comprehend the universal through the part, grasping the abstraction through an apprehension of the particular.22 It is Aristotle’s dedication to the real concrete that enabled him to bridge the gap between universals and particulars. Thus Aristotle sought to transcend the polarity between ideas and sensory objects, mind and body. Unlike the Platonists, he saw a closer affinity between mind and body, arguing that it is only through the corporeal functions of the body, that the mind can exercise its distinctive faculties.23 But in contrast to the atomists, Aristotle maintained the integrity of the whole as a whole.
Like Aristotle before him, Lossky did not isolate an abstracted particular from its context, a part from the whole. In Aristotle’s teleology, the actualization of an organism’s potential cannot be reduced to the potentiality of each of its elements taken separately. Allan Gotthelf explains that for Aristotle,
The development, structure, and functioning of living organisms cannot be wholly explained by—because it is not wholly due to—the simple natures and potentials of the elements which constitute these organisms. No sum of actualizations … ‘element-potentials’ is sufficient by itself for the production of those complex living structures and functionings for which Aristotle offers teleological explanations.24
Thus, for Aristotle, everything is part of a system of related things:
When any one of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the discussion, but the relation of such part to the total form. Similarly, the true object of architecture is not bricks, mortar, or timber, but the house; and so the principal object of natural philosophy is not the material elements, but their composition, and the totality of the form, independently of which they have no existence.… [A] house does not exist for the sake of bricks and stones, but these materials for the sake of the house, and the same is the case with the materials of other bodies.25
Like Aristotle, Lossky rejected mechanistic conceptions in favor of teleological explanations. Mechanism sees events in simple temporal sequence and views causality as an external relation between disconnected elements. It implicitly accepts a vision of the whole that is inorganic and atomistic. By contrast, Lossky (1934a) argued that “the whole conditions its elements and is not the sum of them” (149). His teleological conception suggests that “a new event is conditioned not only by the preceding events but also by the future, namely, by the purpose for the sake of which the change is produced. Thus, e.g., the structure of the eye is partly conditioned by the purpose of having an organ of vision” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 154–55).
It is this Aristotelian emphasis on the integrity of the whole that was furthered by thinkers such as Leibniz and Hegel, modern philosophers who made a huge impact on Lossky.26 Lossky regarded Hegel as a great philosophical intuitivist, another in the grand tradition of concrete ideal-realism. Hegel “makes logic subordinate to the metaphysics of concretely speculative being—his logic is metaphysical.”27 Moreover, like Aristotle, Hegel argued against those who refused to grasp organic unity. He repudiated “conventional opinion,” which saw things as disconnected, atomistic elements. In a now famous passage, Hegel ([1807] 1977) explains:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (2)
Whereas some would criticize this formulation as a rejection of Aristotle’s law of identity, Lossky argued that the Hegelian dialectic posited an “interpenetration between different and even opposite processes (inner and outer) … not an identity of opposites, but only their unity.” For Lossky, the identity of opposites is a meaningless phrase, because nothing can violate the law of contradiction. Lossky thought it far more likely that every change embodied a unity of opposing movements.28 Hence, just as motion is not a contradiction of identity, so too, we must grasp that “both movement and rest belong to the body in different respects” (Lossky 1951, 288).
LOSSKY’S EPISTEMOLOGY
In his theory of knowledge, Lossky carried on the Aristotelian and Hegelian revolt against partial or one-sided perspectives. But his attempts to transcend dualities were also fully within the Russian tradition of philosophical synthesis. In The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (1906), Lossky’s first major book on epistemology, there is a sustained polemic against rationalism and empiricism. Lossky argued that empiricism must inevitably dissolve into sensationalism and subjectivism. Though rationalism and empiricism are “diametrically opposed,” they share a commonality, “the supposition that subject and object are isolated from one another” (Lossky [1906] 1919, 68). In Lossky’s view, epistemology
must relinquish the assumption made by both rationalists and empiricists that subject and object are isolated from one another, that the object lies outside the boundaries of knowledge, and that what can be known of it is either its effect or its copy innate in the subject. The new theory of knowledge must destroy the barriers thus erected between subject and object, recognise their fundamental unity, and in this manner bring about their reconciliation. (69)
Both rationalism and empiricism lead to one-sidedness, such that they exaggerate the importance of one subjective activity or another. Whereas empiricism emphasizes the subject’s sensory data, and rationalism stresses the subject’s reason, Kant’s critical philosophy attempted to resolve the opposition by accentuating “the structure of the cognitive faculty as a whole (sensibility, understanding and reason)” (Lossky [1906] 1919, 402). In effect, however, Kant’s resolution is equally one-sided and subjectivist. Kant’s approach attempts to connect phenomenal reality with the cognitive process, but this is achieved “at the expense of subordinating existence to knowledge … by resolving phenomena, or the world of our experience, into processes of knowledge.” Kant put forth an unsubstantiated assertion that the relations in the world were constructed by the mind, and not inherent in the structure of reality. Likewise, post-Kantian Idealists reconciled knowledge (i.e., consciousness) and existence in a similarly rationalistic manner by suggesting “that existence is nothing else than an evolution of thought.” Thus in each case, the rationalist, empiricist, and Kantian critical alternatives “institute an impassable gulf between knowledge and existence” (403).
Lossky’s intuitivism (or “intuitionalism”) aimed not to discard the old systems, but to “free them from the old exclusiveness, and so prepare a way for their reconciliation and union” (402). He refused to collapse the polarity of knowledge and existence by adopting a rationalist or empiricist perspective. His intuitivism challenged the basis of the dispute by exposing its fallacious premises, showing that each school is both “partly right and partly wrong.” Lossky rejected any “antitheses between knowledge and existence, the rational and the non-rational, the a priori and the a posteriori, the universal and the particular, the analytic and the synthetic” (403).
Though Lossky repudiated dualism, he argued that the subject and the object are independent of each other, and that in reality, there is no subordination of either to the other. Their existence is objective. Their relation is one of coordination. Lossky proposed that the subject and object be reconciled by an “epistemological coordination,” such that “although each retains its independence in respect of the other, they yet form an indissoluble unity” (69).
Citing the influence of Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel, Solovyov, and S. N. Trubetskoy, Lossky viewed this coordinating process as a “union of opposed principles … an act of fertilisation” (221). In Lossky’s view, knowledge emerged through relational comparison, “a process of differentiating the real world by means of comparison” (226). Investigation of reality requires careful differentiation, a process in which the individual abstracts “a fresh aspect” from reality in order to make the world humanly knowable (231).
Knowledge, then, is neither copy, nor symbol, nor appearance of reality, but “reality itself,” a part momentarily abstracted from the whole, but retaining its organic existential validity. Phenomena are neither “mere presentations” nor distorted copies of reality. The relations we perceive are not the artificial constructions of human cognition. They are real. According to Lossky’s intuitivism, “the relation of the phenomenal to the real is … a metaphysical and not an epistemological question” (404). Thinking is not metaphysically creative (409). Knowledge “contains” reality, it “does not create real existence.” For Lossky, the “known object is immanent in the process of cognition” (225).
This “immanent interpenetration” of the subject and the object leads to a “coordination” between them.29 Epistemological coordination links the object, the act of knowing, and the content of knowledge. Though the act of knowing is “subjective,” in that it is performed by the subject, Lossky argues that the object and the content of knowledge are “objective,” not constructed or distorted by the cognitive faculty.30 What we perceive is in the object, not a construction of our imagination. “Greenness,” like shape and density, is an aspect of the object, an aspect singled out through our mental analysis. Unlike Kant, Lossky ([1906] 1919) attempted to defend epistemological objectivity by insisting that knowledge consists of “elements of the real world. The cognitive activity merely subjects this content to a process of discrimination and comparison; it does not introduce any qualitatively new elements into the content known. It neither creates nor reproduces the real world” (405).
Lossky’s struggle against Kantian subjectivism was not merely an assertion of the objectivity of knowledge but also a defense of the necessity for a metaphysical foundation for philosophy. For Lossky, “Metaphysics is the science about the world as a whole, containing the knowledge of things as they are in themselves.” Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy had denied that such a metaphysical science was possible. For Kant, the subject could only apprehend “the objects immanent in his consciousness.” These objects are subjective presentations, “they are things, as they seem to me, but not things as they are in themselves.” Thus Kant claimed that “a science of things as they are in themselves is impossible” and epistemologically illegitimate. In Lossky’s view (1934c), Kant erroneously equated immanence in the consciousness of the subject with immanence in the subject of consciousness (265).
The specifically human component of the cognitive process then is abstraction and differentiation. The act of knowing does not alter the character of the object. The act of differentiating does not create distinctions; it merely detects “such peculiarities as already exist” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 11). But abstraction presupposes a real, complex whole. Copleston (1986) writes: “According to Lossky, the whole is prior to its parts, not constructed out of them. We can designate points in a line, but a line does not consist of juxtaposed points. If it is objected, for example, that a given atom is certainly different from any other atom, Lossky’s reply is that neither can exist apart from the system of atoms” (364).
THE WORLD AS AN ORGANIC WHOLE
Having presented an intuitivist theory of knowledge in 1906, Lossky knew that he would be compelled to write a sequel to his epistemology that would focus on its underlying metaphysic. In The World as an Organic Whole, published in 1917, Lossky continued to discuss many of the same themes, sustaining his opposition to the one-dimensionality of contemporary philosophy. He rejected “mechanistic” and “inorganic” conceptions as one-sided and partial. He argued vociferously for an organic view of the world that complemented his intuitivist epistemology.
Lossky began his metaphysical treatise by explaining that there are two basic, opposing conceptions of the world: the organic and the inorganic. Lossky’s characterization ([1917] 1928) is deeply significant, and it is worth quoting at length:
Those who take the inorganic view conceive of a complex whole with distinguishable parts A, B, C, D, as made up of elements A, B, C, D, capable of existing on their own account independently both of each other and of the whole in which they are found. The elements are taken to be self-subsistent to such an extent that if B, C, D completely disappeared A would go on existing as before. Coming together in space, these elements may form a group and thus give rise to a complex whole. According to this view, the elements are absolute, primordial, and exist unconditionally. The whole is, on the contrary, relative, derivative, and entirely determined by its parts. In other words, plurality is regarded as primary and unity as secondary and as conditioned by the plurality. (1)
Lossky distinguishes this inorganic, reductive conception of the world, from the organic view:
Those who take the organic view understand plurality and wholeness in a diametrically opposite way. It is the whole that exists primarily, and the elements can exist and come into being only within the system of the whole. The world cannot be explained as the result of adding A to B, then to C, and so on: plurality cannot give rise to wholeness, but is, on the contrary, generated by it. In other words, the whole is prior to its parts; the absolute must be sought in the domain of wholeness or, rather, beyond it, and certainly not among the elements; the elements are in any case derivative and relative, i.e., they can only exist in relation to the system of which they are members. (2)
Lossky argued that the inorganic view was the basis for mechanistic and reductive materialism. It perpetuated a philosophy of external relations, while bolstering a vulgar empiricist, atomistic worldview. The organic conception, by contrast, is teleological, integrative, internally relational, and reflective of the nature of reality.31
This formulation is crucial because it exhibits Lossky’s dedication to the doctrine of internal relations, his conviction that in an organic unity, nothing is “constructed out of its elements in an external manner” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 17). Every element in the whole, every atom in the world, every note in a musical composition is an internal “aspect of the world discoverable by means of analysis and existing, not independently, but only on the basis of a world-whole, only within a universal system.” The organic view sees A and B in an internal “relation to each other as one whole, each aspect of which subsists together with the others, on the basis of the whole.” The internal relations between the elements of the whole are objective relations of difference and similarity, of quantity and quality, of temporality and spa-tiality, of causality and interaction, of ends and means. The “network of relations is all-embracing and all-pervading” (19).
The doctrine of internal relations involves vast issues of ontology and epistemology and could be the subject of a book in itself. In order to grasp the full depth of Lossky’s thought, it is necessary to examine, however briefly, some of the major questions concerning the internalist-externalist debate. These issues are significant for two reasons:
First, internalism permeates all of Russian thought and Lossky’s thought in particular. It is, in fact, central to the theme of synthesis in Russian philosophy. But the debate is not distinctively Russian. The internalist-externalist debate is as old as the speculative metaphysics of Parmenides. Ironically, during the Russian Silver Age, in the period from 1890 to 1920, Western, post-Hegelian, Idealist philosophers, such as Bradley, Royce, and Bosanquet, were raising some of the very same internalist issues as their Russian counterparts. The internalist-externalist dispute has continued throughout the twentieth century in the writings of such distinguished philosophers as A. J. Ayer, Brand Blanshard, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, and thinkers in the Marxist tradition. No discussion of the flavor of Russian thought, or of Lossky’s thought, would be complete without a grasp of these important issues.
Second, the internalist-externalist debate is crucial to our understanding of Rand’s philosophy. In Part 2, I argue that Objectivism exhibits an organic, internalist orientation, even as it seeks to transcend the very dichotomy of the internal versus the external. Rand was a rare philosophic phenomenon: she was an epistemological realist who recognized the relational character of existence and knowledge. The radical thrust of Rand’s cultural criticism lies ultimately in its ability to trace the internal relationships between and among the various constituents and institutions in social reality. Although Rand diverges considerably from the strict organicity of the Hegelian Idealists, there is an element of internalism and organic unity which pervades the very fabric of Objectivism.
In exploring the full significance of Lossky’s internalism, it would be valuable to discuss complementary developments in the thought of other philosophers. Lossky’s perspective itself is an outgrowth of his own appropriation of Leibnizian, Spinozistic, and Hegelian insights. One modern expositor of the internalist orientation who shares many of Lossky’s philosophical premises, is Brand Blanshard. As an Absolute Idealist, Blanshard, like Lossky, rejects the distinctions between necessary and contingent and between analytic and synthetic. Significantly, Blanshard’s work has been acclaimed in Objectivist publications and lectures.32
To begin, it is important to ask what exactly is meant by “internal” as opposed to “external” relations. According to Blanshard ([1962] 1964): “A given term is internally related to another if in the absence of the relation it could not be what it is. A term is externally related to another if the relation could equally be present or absent while the term was precisely the same” (475).
Richard Rorty (1967) dramatizes this distinction between internal and external relations by describing two extreme positions. The internalist orientation is associated with idealism and monism. It sees all the properties of a thing as “essential to its being what it is (and, a fortiori, that all its relations are internal to it).” This theory views every property of every element as profoundly significant such that the alienation or deprivation of a single aspect would mean, “in a nontrivial sense,” that the element was no longer what it once was (125).
If I say: “I am a young American male of Greek and Sicilian descent,” each one of the terms I have used to describe myself is “internal” to who I am. “Young” indicates that I still consider myself youthful while being thirtysomething. “American” designates not only my citizenship, but indicates that I have grown up in a society that is freer and more democratic than most. “Male” identifies my gender, while “Greek” and “Sicilian” suggest family traditions that were crucial to my upbringing. Indeed, they might even conjure up an image of a swarthy, “Mediterranean” complexion. In any event, the internalist would say no element of this self-description can be altered without changing the essential quality of who and what I am today. If I were older, my description might be different. When I was younger, I know that some of my attitudes were markedly different than they are today. If I were female, or a Russian citizen, or of African descent, my experiences, not to mention my physical appearance, would be correspondingly different. That is not to say that I might not hold some of the same values that I hold today. But the simple fact is that none of the attributes I have noted in the above description, namely, “young,” “American,” “male,” “Greek,” and “Sicilian,” can be separated from the person that is me. And if it were possible to alter any of these characteristics, then I would be a different person!
According to Rorty, the externalist orientation “holds that none of a thing’s properties are essential to it (and thus, a fortiori, that no relations are internal to it). This view is put forward by those who make a firm distinction between the thing itself and a description of it.” The externalists argue that although certain properties of the thing enable us to describe it, the absence of these properties does not mean that the thing is no longer the same. Such a proposition is “trivial” or “misleading,” according to the externalists. For in one sense, the alteration of one single aspect of a thing makes it different from what it once was. But in another sense, the modification of a single element would merely change our description of the thing. The externalists argue that “there are an infinity of equally correct descriptions, and nothing in the thing itself determines which of these is the description.” The externalists assert that the specification of “essential properties” is thus a nominal exercise and completely arbitrary (Rorty 1967, 125). Thus, to say that “I am a young, American male of Greek and Sicilian descent” is merely to describe what I am. I could have provided an equivalently correct description by saying that I was a man in my thirties, with several birthmarks on my face, working at an American college, and living in Brooklyn, New York. Or I could have said that I was 5′7½″, 145 pounds, with a size 8½ shoe. The point is that I can provide endless self-descriptions and not one of them is truer than any other. To say that one attribute is more “essential” than any other attribute is to place an arbitrarily privileged distinction on one to the exclusion of others.
But common sense tells us that some things are more important than others. If I were to remove one tiny birthmark from my face, this would have less of an effect on my essential “personhood” than, say, a sex-change operation. What is the something in “maleness” that is more significant to my self than “birthmark-ness”? Would a new “female” appearance alter any of the fundamental “me”? Externalism does not deny that there is this thing called me, but it rejects the claim that there is anything about “me” that we can consider more essential than any other thing. Hence, it views the designation of essence as a purely linguistic, nominal, and arbitrary exercise.
Curiously, both the internalist and the externalist deny Aristotle’s distinction between essence and accident. The externalists claim that the characterization of a thing’s “essence” is a purely conventional practice, and the internalists also argue that the distinction between “essential” and “nonessential” is arbitrary. They believe that every thing has an intrinsic nature, which is organic and integrated. Though the internalists accept that essence-accident distinctions are inevitable in a world of imperfect knowledge, they seem to imply that such division is ontologically illegitimate, for every aspect is as important as every other.33 By extension, the internalists also seem to imply that there can be a world of perfect knowledge.
This helps us to focus on one of the fundamental problems inherent in the most extreme form of internalism: a problem of individuation arising from excessive integration. In Hegel and Blanshard, as in Lossky, there is a tendency toward strict organicity.34 Every part of the totality must be considered when assessing the significance of any other part. Expanding the discussion beyond the mere consideration of an object’s relational properties, Blanshard argues, for instance, that every object has a certain shape, and that this shape is the result of two factors: the object’s nature and its interaction with other objects.35 Blanshard ([1962] 1964) writes that a thing’s “ultimate elements are engaged in manifold interactions, by way of attraction and repulsion, with things around it, and these almost certainly determine its shape down to the last detail. This particular shape, like this degree of malleability, is not externally related to its other characters; they are bound up with these causally and therefore … necessarily” (481).
Although Blanshard recognizes that different entities have parts that are “more obviously interdependent” than others, still he claims that no element is external to the totality. A thing is what it is by virtue of “lines of demarcation—causal, logical, or both—running out into an illimitable universe” (485). Thus, the thing is affected in varying degrees by its relations, “no matter how external they may seem.” Since “everything is related in some way to everything else, no knowledge will reveal completely the nature of any term until it has exhausted that term’s relations to everything else” (Blanshard 1940, 2:452). This would suggest that everything must be known before anything can be analyzed.
To transcend this problem, both Hegel and Lossky hypothesized an Absolute standpoint, whereby the Truth lies in a Metaphysical Whole as grasped by an omniscient consciousness. In such a whole, all relations are internal and simultaneous. The main problem for such an internalist orientation is individuation: trying to abstract and define the nature of an individual entity such that it is not dissolved in the relationships that it embodies. It is this dilemma of individuation that prompted Lossky to assert the ontological priority of concrete particulars within the whole. He calls his system concrete ideal-realism and sees both Hegel and Aristotle as his philosophic forebears. He argues that relations are not disembodied; just as no object is external to its relations, relations have no existence except between objects. Lossky ([1917] 1928) explains: “Relations are not independent; they cannot exist on their own account, apart from the elements they relate” (37). And yet if each thing is constituted by a cluster of relations, and the relations themselves can be extended to include the organic whole itself, we are still faced with an unresolved individuation problem.
Externalists such as Thomas Nagel and A. J. Ayer reject internalist o rganicism because they correctly perceive that it fails to resolve this issue of individuation. Nagel argues further that any search for the real “nature” or “essence” of a thing is incoherent. As Rorty (1967) explained it, Blanshard’s “essence” of X depends on a metaphysical “X-as-known-by-an-ideal-knower,” that is, a Being who can grasp all of the relational interactions between and among all of the constituent properties of the totality (129). The externalists reject organic internalism because such a system ultimately depends on omniscience as a standard of certainty.
Issues of individuation and omniscience are not inherent in externalism. The externalist orientation claims to oppose the internalism of the Idealists with a hard-boiled philosophic realism. Things are what they are and cannot be defined in terms of their relations to anything else. A thing has an identity and its nature cannot “be constituted by the nature of the system to which it belongs” (Copleston 1966, 405). But the externalist argues that there is a sharp dichotomy between what an entity really is, something which cannot be known completely, and our linguistic descriptions of what an entity is, something which is entirely arbitrary. The externalist perpetuates the Kantian distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world, necessity and contingency, analysis and synthesis. The externalist’s “realism” dissolves into a crude, dualistic, and atomistic perspective on reality. Its fundamental problem is a lack of integration, owing to excessive differentiation. Every thing is self-subsistent and logically independent of every other thing.36 Relations and systems are arbitrary constructs of the mind.
It is for this reason that Lossky rejected externalism as a vestige of Kantian dualism. Kant argued that relations are added to the data of our senses by the constructive activity of the mind. The subject creates or constructs the object and its relations. But according to Lossky ([1917] 1928), the mind contemplates relations that exist in the world. The relations we conceive “presuppose relations that obtain within organic being” (24). They are “objective elements which can be perceived” (33). They exist “in the very nature of the object” (34).
As an organic internalist, Lossky denied both dualism and atomism. Like Blanshard and other internalists, Lossky saw an intimate connection between the necessary and the contingent, the analytic and the synthetic, the causal and the logical. Human knowledge cannot be bifurcated because reality is an integral whole.
Within this organic totality, the elements can enter into opposition and conflict with one another, but they are still interconnected and interrelated by virtue of their presence within a systemic context. Organicism recognizes the interaction of elements as more than “the mere sum of two actions of which the first follows the second as a response.” The nature of interaction lies in the fact that it involves the “simultaneous determination” of two or more elements, such that “there is no meaning in drawing a distinction between the agent and the patient” (5–6). Lossky recognized metaphysical plurality in the world, but refused to view the world’s many elements as independent of the whole. Each of the mechanical elements of the system is conditioned by the totality itself (6–7).
Lossky argued further that “not a single knowable element” of the totality “exists on its own account, apart from a necessary relation to other elements.” Every object of knowledge has distinguishable aspects, but none of these can be grasped in isolation from the total context. Metaphysical plurality does not discount the importance of causal connections and internal relations (11–12).
Thus the elements of the whole may be separated in one respect, but “in another respect they have the same basis and belong to the same whole. Their very separateness necessarily demands that in some other respect they should be united and interdependent” (13). Those who subscribe to the inorganic, mechanistic, and atomistic perspective conceive of atoms as independent of one another. Yet the atoms themselves belong to one universe in which they interact. The “single whole space” of the universe constitutes “the one all-embracing basis” that is common to all of its constituent elements. Hence the position and movement of an atom is relative within the broader context of the whole.
Lossky argued that not even the atomist can deny the essentially organic structure of the world. For even in the atomist’s denial is the retention of wholeness with every judgment made. Every philosophical theory presumes the idea of a whole that constitutes and is constituted by its elements. Thus the idea of an organic “whole lies at the root of every judgement we make concerning any object whatsoever” (8). If we deny such an organic, relational structure to reality, we forfeit the conditions that make the world knowable.
Lossky’s organicism and intemalism proliferate throughout his works, even in his less than fully developed aesthetics. Though Lossky lacked a formalized philosophy of art, he viewed each work of art as a totality, “the successive parts of which exist in consequence and for the sake of one another as well as of the whole: the parts of such a whole are not only a means but also an end for one another” (159–60). In this regard, Lossky appropriated a notable Aristotelian theme. In De Poetica, Aristotle wrote:
The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.37
Lossky ([1917] 1928) expresses this same organicist sentiment with regard to musical composition: A piece of music is a complex whole in which its constituent elements form an organic unity. Each part is in harmony with the other, and all parts exist for the whole (48).
And yet, despite the ultimate necessity of holding an organic view on all ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic issues, Lossky is compelled to explain the prevalence of inorganic and atomistic conceptions. If organicism and internalism are true of reality and of knowledge, then why do fragmented perspectives endure?
Lossky argued that since knowledge requires comparison, differentiation, and analysis, it can disintegrate into atomistic elements. Like all entities on earth, humans are beings of finite capabilities. At any given moment, they focus on “some one part of the world” and abstract this part from the whole in a particular respect. Since knowledge expands with the addition of information, they can conclude falsely “that knowledge consists in constructing in our minds a complex whole out of independent elements.” This is the Kantian error which fails to discriminate “our acts of knowing from that which is known.” Such a mistake must inevitably “ascribe the characteristic of fragmentariness to the objects of knowledge and to the whole knowable world” (15).
Lossky believed, however, that the analysis that is performed by the mind yields a partial and incomplete picture of the whole. Lossky was unable to attain a fully integrative and organic view without the infusion of mystical elements. As a religious philosopher, Lossky hypothesized that an Absolute “being whose powers of attention and discrimination were infinite would be capable of contemplating everything at the same time, both as connected with and as distinguished from everything” (16). Such an omniscient being would be incapable of error, but He would be able to see the organic whole “in its differentiated aspect at once, without being broken up in time” (ibid.).
In his analysis of the persistence of fragmentation, Lossky seems oblivious to institutional or historical explanations. Marx maintained, for instance, that it was the capitalist mode of production that made such fragmentation possible, and inevitable. And it was Lossky’s student, Ayn Rand, who proposed that social fragmentation was a constituent element of a broader systemic irrationality: statism.
The thought of N. O. Lossky was a fusion of complementary organicist and internalist tendencies in Russian and Western philosophy. Lossky’s ideal-realism exhibited a Russian proclivity to synthesize opposites and resolve antagonisms. He rejected the dualistic obsession with dichotomies of rationalism or empiricism, idealism or materialism, knowledge or existence. These alternatives were, for him, partial and incomplete. Like other thinkers in Russian philosophy, however, Lossky achieved the ultimate integration through a mystical Absolute. His system of hierarchical personalism embraced a vision of the world as an organic whole, a unity of sobornost’ achieved in God’s Kingdom of Harmony.
Ayn Rand’s philosophical project embodies this same struggle against dualities, the same powerful propensity toward synthesis. But although she appears to have inadvertently accepted her teacher’s formal dialectical insights, she adamantly opposed his mysticism.
